Toxic Avenger's brilliant rant about the importance of Net Neutrality

Lloyd Kaufman, cofounder of Troma Entertainment (the people who brought us such films as the Toxic Avenger) has a brilliant, profane, and stirring editorial in support of Net Neutrality on Techdirt. Kaufman explains how an open Internet is the only competitve hedge against the communications giants that own "cinemas, newspapers, T.V. stations, radio and even Broadway 'legitimate' theaters." Thanks to the failure of the FCC to give Net Neutrality their full protection, and the court ruling that gutted the FCC's weak protections, Net Neutrality is in real trouble. Kaufman's editorial a great arguments for its preservation.

The giant devil worshiping international media conglomerates want to create a super highway with expensive prohibitive tolls with faster and better internet for themselves. This will make it impossible for independent artists or innovators because they simply can’t compete. The result will be similar to US television, where the biggest companies own the networks and cable systems etc. and air constant iterations and reruns of their own content. It will become harder to get anything independent into the consciousness of the public. The Internet will become an NBC-ABC-CBS kind of world unless we the people take action.

In 2010, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) created the Open Internet Order which set anti-blocking and anti-discrimination Network Neutrality rules. While the FCC claimed the rules would protect Open Internet, many of us Net Neutrality advocates felt the proposed rules had many loopholes and were made with the purpose of winning support from the telco lobbyists. Of course, we were right. The FCC stated that the rules would make it illegal for ISPs such as Verizon to block services or charge content providers like Netflix for faster Internet highways to their customers. Now, just a few weeks ago-the rules were invalidated by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia because the FCC chose years ago to classify broadband providers in a manner that exempts them from treatment as common carriers and therefore has no right to regulate them.